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Comment by rubenbe | Hacker News Reader

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rubenbe

I tried this for a while and I consider the experiment failed.

No closed source means no Whatsapp, etc. Let's face reality, no-one is using XMPP ;)

In the end I started the policy "Prefer open-source software on Android", which works pretty well:

* Note taking using orgzly

* Tasks using opentasks (https://github.com/dmfs/opentasks)

* File Sync using Syncthing

* Contacts, Calendar using davdroid & nextcloud

* Firefox for browsing (this is a no-brainer)

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Try Telegram instead of WhatsApp. It's a good drop-in replacement.

the trouble is to get your friends to use it. A vast portion of my daily communication runs over Whatsapp. A realistic migration would entail convincing 25+ people to switch apps.

Network effects are powerful.

I use a profile pic on WhatsApp that says "Please write me on Signal". This works very nicely in my circle, I get a lot of messages on Signal and it's getting better year after year.

I think I'll add "Telegram" to the profile pic as well.

Let them try Telegram's awesome desktop clients. It's quite a good argument for many as I hear lots of people complaining about WhatsApp's.

I've been using the Whatsapp Web version since it was released and it has worked flawlessly

Telegram Desktop works without your phone and also is a much leaner native desktop app (written in C++ with Qt).

Even better, Signal.

Buggier, less features, and even less people using it.

Also not available on F-Droid IIRC. Has this changed?

> and even less people using it.

Are you sure about this? In my circle most people seem to know/use WhatsApp and Signal.

According to https://www.androidrank.org/listcategory?category=COMMUNICAT... Telegram has ~100 million installs and Signal ~5 million.

It doesn't encrypt end-to-end by default though.

FOSS client is more important IMHO.

> I tried this for a while and I consider the experiment failed.

Me too, that's why I'll go for a two phone solution. One main driver (FOSS) and another one for the crap ;)

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